Thanks very much! I’m hoping to get the next episode released this weekend. That should be the first of my polish pass through the series up to the new 2.x standard. The first couple of episodes - Tartakovsky, Christophsis, Malevolence, and then Ryloth - will take a little longer as I’ll be rethinking their plots a bit more, but the remainder of the existing ~30 episodes will be much more of a tightening than a re-edit, and then I’m back on with proper new stuff.
Glad you enjoyed the Tartakovsky episode. I won’t be making many changes to that, mainly just some dialogue trims to strengthen Obi-Wan’s opinion of Anakin.
That said, regarding Christophsis, I don’t want to make it any longer, and indeed I want to make it a little tighter. One of the pillars of my approach to this series edit is “Quality over length”, and I don’t want to artificially enlarge an episode to make it feel more cinematic. Cat & Mouse is fairly decent but focuses on the stealth ship, which I think raises too many questions this early in the show since it’s not seen again. It also delays our show’s focal protagonist (Ahsoka) and one of our season’s focal villains (Ventress). And Hidden Enemy had decent Ventress scenes, which I did include, but its other plot was the traitor clone. While decent, I didn’t want to have a traitor clone in focus so early in the show before we’ve got to know more of clone culture - though I did include that content in my season two clone individuality anthology episode.
The changes I think I’ll be making there though are some tightening of the start around the blockade and space battle situation, which is a bit muddy right now, and the partial or full removal of Bail, as much as I like his character. We’ll get through this episode fairly quickly - Ventress is there to distract/delay so that the Seppies can drop ground forces, then Ahsoka will join and help the Republic counterattack. It’s not a strong episode either way, so I think it’s best to get through it quickly rather than try to add to it.
I had considered merging Cat and Mouse and Hidden Enemy into a later ‘return to Christophsis’ episode too, where in context the traitor clone had leaked the stealth ship specs (to help explain why it doesn’t return), but ultimately still the stealth ship raises more questions than the value it gives us, and the Hidden Enemy stuff grouped with other clone focused stuff allowed me to produce a very strong little anthology which helps the viewer get used to clone variety and Rex, which was a useful focus going forward.
I did originally think I’d do something like Smudger and maybe mix my Christophsis episode with another (like the Domino Squad arc), but I think my recent reordering of the first season (not yet released) with a focus on how the season flows as a whole will go a long way towards making the beginning of the show more compelling and cohesive, much in the way a movie that hits many good connected beats would.
Regarding aspect ratio, it’s not something I’m really considering changing, mainly since the whole show is like that and if I’m changing the ratio I’m needing to think about framing in every scene. Plus, I think it’s something the viewer can accommodate quickly. I did consider using NumeralJoker’s sources initially - indeed they were the spark for this entire project since they presented each arc as a whole episode - but ultimately I found that I didn’t need the higher resolution because outputting any higher gave such little benefit relative to file size (looks great on my huge TV as it is, plus editing would have been slowed massively by using such large source files) and I didn’t think I needed the new colour timing, since to me it was relatively minor plus I could apply changes myself if needed.
Oh and Imhotep, I wanted to thank you once again for yet another wonderfully detailed post. This stuff is so so valuable to me in working on this project. I’d just had my second jab so I was full of the free trial of covid at the time, hence no reply, but it was a great read, and naturally I’ll be giving it lots of thought!